Film

05 January 2008

The other night I found myself in the kitchen with half the ingredients necessary to make a nice duck dinner. So I had to improvise. Earlier that day, on Twitter, Robert Scoble was going on about how if you made bad videos, people would watch them.

So I shot video of our cooking experience from assembly to plating. It is now my first video blogging effort.

Here's the recipe for :

You Need:

2 organic duck breasts good sized

Dry white wine (we used a Roussanne)

Dry red wine (we used a shiraz)

3 or 4 tbsp butter

One small orange (we used a satsuma)

2 tbsp pomegranate molasses

Salt and pepper

To Cook It:

Mix 2 tbsp pomegranate molasses with about a quarter cup of red wine and set aside.

trim and clean the duck breasts

score the skin of the duck breasts (i forgot to video this step)

Preheat oven to lowest setting

Pan sear the duck breast until about 75% cooked

Take the duck breasts out of the pan, season with salt and pepper, and place on a plate in the oven

Clarify the duck fat and remove about 75%

Using the white and red wine, deglaze the pan

Allow the wine to cook down

Add the pomegranate / wine mixture

Allow mixture to cook down a bit

Add the butter slowly

Allow to cook way way down until it's thick

Add the oranges

Cook until the oranges are warm

Add Salt and Pepper to taste

Remove duck breasts from oven, plate and cover with the mixture from the pan.

The Video:

The video shows my wife and I creating an excellent meal. But, the video has the following rookie issues:

Sometimes the shot isn't quite lined up.

The sound is not quite even and quiet throughout.

It's bloody long! About 30 minutes.

As a celebrity chef, I haven't quite found my voice. I'm earnest, but not funny.

I shot over an hour of initial footage, my Flip camera only has an hour of memory, so at the end, video is shot on my still camera.

My video editor was free and the text feature on it was amazingly bad. Like, stunningly awful.

11 May 2007

No matter how much I like to think I'm an evolved, caring, compassionate human being, I'm afraid I'm still amused at the outright stupidity of people and the games they play.

Recently, HBO's CTO "Bob Zitter" decided that he didn't like the term "Digital Rights Management". He thought it was misleading and scary. His alternative (no I'm not making this up) is Digital Consumer Enablement (DCE).

Zitter went on to discuss HBO’s strategy. HBO wants to sell shows in HighDef, but the problem is that many consumers are watching HD content using the analog outputs on their set-top boxes — often because their fancy new HD televisions don’t implement HBO’s favorite form of DRM. So what HBO wants is to disable the analog outputs on the set-top box, so consumers have no choice but to adopt HBO’s favored DRM.

Which makes the nature of the “enablement” clear. By enabling your set-top box to be incompatible with your TV, HBO will enable you to buy an expensive new TV.

In 2009, so the story goes, the US airwaves are to be devoid of low-def signals and everyone in the country will need to buy a new television. I somehow doubt that the federal government will force everyone in the country to buy a new television.

However, the ramification here is that there will be no standards for DRM (or DCE) and that various entertainment companies could require personalized descramblers to get their product.

Given that I only watch baseball and the Food Network, this isn't going to impact me much. I haven't had HBO since the 80s and feel no personal loss.

What worries me is that this would likely mean that for all users (myself included) Internet-based broadcast media will skyrocket in popularity. I can get all the HBO movies downloaded from Amazon or iTunes anyway. This means massive bandwidth usage for bloated multimedia content.

The BitTorrent store will work slightly differently than rival digital media offerings like the iTunes Store of Apple and the Xbox Live service of Microsoft. BitTorrent will commingle free downloads of users’ own video uploads with sales of professional fare. And while it will sell digital copies of shows like “24” and “Bones” for $1.99 an episode, it will only rent movies. Once the films are on the PC, they expire within 30 days of their purchase or 24 hours after the buyer begins to watch them.

New releases like “Superman Returns” cost $3.99, while classics like “Reservoir Dogs” cost $2.99. The studio’s content plays in Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 11. It is secured by Microsoft’s antipiracy software, which blocks users from watching rented movies on more than one PC or sending them to others over the Internet.

For video games especially, a backcatalog in compelling. No one wants to litter their shelves with bulky boxes and manuals from old video games. Or worse, don't have a 5.25" floppy to run them.

Games for the PC-AT like Art of War, Ultima II or Neuromancer would be a fun diversion while sitting in an airport.

BitTorrent has done this superbly. The entertainment files are still covered by DRM, but the price point is so low that it hardly matters.

For me, this beats the hell out of Tivo and such things, as the television itself is less and less part of my daily life. However, when my wife is taking an extra hour to leave the office, it would be great to fire up an episode of Battlestar Galactica.

I think the entertainment companies will soon realize that they can make great money from small payment, one-shot events like this. And, perhaps for the first time, they can truly exploit their long tail.

They could get an on-line permanent archive and museum of every film ever made. Now, just do this with music and we're golden.

13 May 2005

Now 25 years ago, I was involved in a natural disaster of epic proportions. Several tornadoes came and levelled my flat, featureless hometown, Grand Island, Nebraska ... making it even more flat and featureless. It was pretty astonishing all the way around. They made a cheesy movie called "Night of the Twisters" about it. Since the film was made in Canada, there was a lot of trees in the movie that we didn't have in real life. Now there's a web site for we survivors of the tornadoes, all 34,993 of us (seven people perished).

Because the town was levelled, Jimmy Carter flew in on a plane ensuring that I met him twice. Once at the white house in 1976 and once in Grand Island in 1980. He looked a lot older the second time.